The ponderings life brings by

Firstly, let me admit, I don’t actually know who Jim Halpert is. I discovered this quote on Pinterest, The Land of Discovering Everything. And it stuck in my mind because things have been getting serious with my boyfriend of not quite a year. (Holy cow that is coming up soon.. I probably need to go find him a gift!!) But things keep getting serious, and in between these moments of pure I-Never-Want-to-Leave-Your-Arms-Happiness there are niggling doubts that keep appearing.

Let me share them with you, because perhaps by expressing them in writing I can learn to, as Jim suggests, forget about the logic and fear and doubt, and let go. Take the jump…

Niggling Doubt #1: I can share any real information with him. I can tell him anything about my day, and the future, and the past, but if I try to spark a creative topic, something that cannot be easily applicable to his life, he tunes me out. He just stares at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. And to his very man-logical self, I sure am speaking a foreign language. This is something that I am struggling with adjusting to. All of my best friends and I have these long fanciful conversations. My roommate and I in college would chat about these crazy ideas after we turned out the lights before our dreams overtook us. I cherish these conversations, as they are the way my brain processes everything. As I drift off to sleep, fanciful ideas and concepts are my only thoughts. My father does not think this way, but my mother does. So clearly that relationship can work… But it’s hard to think of him as my best friend when he won’t/can’t have the conversations my best friends and I have always had.

Niggling Doubt #2: Does he have to be my best friend? Can’t he just be ONE of my friends? Can’t he just be my boy + friend?

Niggling Doubt #3: I am very messy. This irritates him constantly. He says he can live with it and that I’m getting better, but is that fair to him?

Niggling Doubt #4: Back to #1, we’ve never had a strong conversation about faith, either. I have been with him to church, he’s even recently suggested God sent me to him… but without a God conversation, is our relationship really built on His ground?

Niggling Doubt #5: I have to bribe and pull teeth and beat him in to submission to get him to watch a movie I’ve picked out. And 99 times out of 100 he still doesn’t make it through it because “they’re not interesting”

Niggling Doubt #6: We have overlapping music tastes, but if I pick the music it is bad and not anything good.

Niggling Doubt #7: I keep feeling as though I do a lot of things to irritate him, but because I sometimes have an overly explosive/semi-dramatic way of handling things he can’t express them. I fear I’ve ruined our open communications by being childish. But clearly he’s still in for the long-haul, as he’s stuck around.

Niggling Doubt #8: We’re too much alike sometimes. We both struggle with not getting our way, which sounds so childish when I say it like that. I want to be the person that drops it, because I know it won’t matter in the long-run, but then I just feel like I’m being run over, so I have to dig my heels in exceptionally.

Niggling Doubt #9: The fact that I have 8 other doubts.

According to Jim, I should take a big breath and forget about logic and reason, forget the fear that these matter too much.

But I struggle sometimes with forgetting fear..

Any words of advice? Things you’ve found in your relationships? Things you know are a problem, and things you know that when I’m 40 I’ll laugh at worrying at?

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I don’t know about you, but when I try to think about what it is that my friends and I sit and talk about all day long, I can’t really come up with a list. It’s not usually intellectual, that’s not to say we don’t have smart things to say about whatever we’re talking about, but we don’t sit down and discuss the thematic variations of Shakespeare, or the interesting reaction between Sodium and water in Chlorine gas. We talk about stupid things, Scrubs, Better Off Ted, the weird books we’ve read, the bad movies we’ve watched, the weird new games we’ve tried, it leads to hours and hours of conversation because each one leads to another story and another.

I feel so lost when I lose my stupid conversations, it makes me feel like I’ve lost all my fun, like I’ve lost my creative and interesting parts.

This really has come around because it has been months since I’ve seen my best friends, and I miss being able to talk for hours about nothing. My life has become in a rut, and I miss my stupidity.

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I have always been the kind of person who seeks advice. Advice about EVERYTHING because I want to hear the affirmation that I am doing the correct thing. And relationship advice was the one I sought the most, for the first 21.5 years of my life I asked advice about every single thing I would say, every action a crush might make, and I would attempt to read into every text, every motion, every smile.

Let me tell you something I’ve learned this last half of a year, something I wish I’d *really* understood. In my opinion, some of the best and last relationship advice you’ll ever need:

If you need advice that is not the right person.

Now I’m not saying this is true about every scenario, I recently took a poll of my male friends and brothers trying to find the BEST first Christmas present for my current boyfriend. But if you need advice and find yourself spending more time analyzing and discussing your significant other or crush than you do actually talking to your significant other or crush, you are not in a good place. The relationship I’ve recently found has worked so well because we have this, sometimes weird, ability to discuss ANYTHING.

No, this is not infallible, I, in particular, have quite a few unnecessary walls, but that’s a post for another day.

My point is that if you can’t talk about your relationship with the person who is actually in the relationship with you, you will not be satisfied.

Recently it has occurred to me how much life changes during your 20s. Today I’m going to address the situation of having babies.

Not too long ago, pregnant was that terrifying ‘P’ word uttered by my high school peers that were participating in activities I felt we were too young to be doing. At the age of 22 my peers have a very split view of pregnancy: about half are fully prepared and attempting for it (or have already successfully had their babes), and the other half still find it a terrifying word that has repercussions they know their lives are not ready for.

This entire thought has occurred recently because of the news of many of my friends/facebook acquaintances. Many of them are becoming pregnant, and a disappointingly high number of them are experiencing miscarriages. It is an awful thing for them to go through, and I, still being at the “Oh God, please don’t let me get pregnant right now” phase, can’t fathom or help them deal with. Condolences are just not enough to losing a baby you so dearly wanted and had already fallen in love with.

I guess I just can’t get over how big a difference five years’ time makes. Five years ago, as children, some would have prayed for this news (as sad as that is) and would have found being pregnant the end of the world. Now, the miscarriage is the end of the world, and pregnancy is the blessing. It is a weird and uncomfortable thought, because the latter is what I would consider the ‘right’ way of thinking (even though I still fall under the “Oh please don’t let me be pregnant” category.

I guess that is the big difference between being an “adult” and being a child.

I guess I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, but I am keeping my friends in my thoughts and prayers. And it’s given me more to think about, and will probably influence the way I raise my [far, far in the future] children. It’s disturbing, now that I’m an “adult” the way my peers thought back in the day. I hope other children don’t think and feel that way, now that I’ve seen the devastation and heartache that comes with the loss of something so desperately loved. How can you wish that away as a child?

Here’s a small kid’s story that just came to me today. (Like seriously, I was walking around chanting it) when it hit me that I needed to write it down and have one of my awesomely artistic friends look into illustrating it.

He beats the hill
And stomps the ground
A giant’s tantrum looming

The earth will shake
The ground will quake
The little giant fuming

His mother frowns
And looks around
Worried someone is watching

She asks him nice
To be polite
He just continues screaming

She taps her foot
And shakes her head
Her temper is a rising

He throws himself
Upon the ground
Not seeing what is brewing

Her face turns red
Her lips get thin
Another giant seething

Two giants rant
Two giants rail
The hill begins a moving

They’re both too mad
They’re both too loud
They don’t notice it shaking

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As I snuggled into my boyfriend’s chest one day, his light blue eyes looked down at me and he asked me, “Do you think things can be too good to be true?”

And I had no response for him, not at the time.

Perhaps it is because he has yet to experience the avalanche of thoughts that tend to tumble out of my brain when I’m asked a question that I hadn’t already considered. The back-and-forth, give-and-take, yes-or-no cascade of thoughts that are how I make decisions came to mind, but I closed my mouth and mulled them over silently. More than likely because we haven’t been dating terribly long, and crazy should be allowed to creep up on him so he can accept it gradually, rather than drown in it.

It took me at least a week, but I think I’m prepared to present an answer to this [what should be simple] question: I do not think things can be too good to be true.

I think things can sound too good to be true, things can look too good to be true, but I don’t think things can actually be too good to be true.

Allow me to elaborate, say a car salesman tells you all of these things about a car he wants you to buy, it sounds too good to be true, and it is, because he has slightly falsified or elaborated what he claims, or he is not telling you the whole truth. If you are driving past a home and you think “My, that is my dream house!” and without stepping foot inside of it you purchase it because it looks too good to be true. But to your horror, when you get inside of it, the inside has mold and water damage, and a couple dead bodies. Yup, that house looked too good to be true, and was, because you did not see all of it.

But I do not believe things can actually be too good to be true because once something has reached a state of being, it really is that. So it can’t be too good to be true, because it just is that awesome.

Your best friend that you met in kindergarten did not seem too good to be true, you just thought they were awesome and went with it. Your favorite novel did not seem too good to be true half-way through, you didn’t abandon it for fear of what was on the last page, you just thought it was the most wondrous thing you’d ever read.

Now that’s not to say that things don’t turn out bad in the end, because, well, that does happen. But I don’t think that made them “Too good to be true” at the beginning, just not wholly known.

I find that most people who question whether things are ‘too good to be true’ are not used to having nice or happy things happen to them. So to me, it is a pessimistic phrase, and although I can be terribly sarcastic (bordering on mean) I am not a pessimistic person by nature, and so perhaps that is my particular distaste for the phrase. If something exciting is happening and you are busy questioning “is this too good to be true?” the exciting thing might just pass you by, or you are so worried about being hurt that you refuse to take part in “too good to be true”.

So I guess if I find something that is actually good, rather than question whether it is too good to be true, I accept that I deserve good things to happen to me and just go with it.

I don’t know if that cleared it up, or if I just talked in circles, but, there’s my opinion on the phrase “Too good to be true”.